The global Internet has become a mass media on par with radio and television. And just like radio and television content, Internet content is largely supported by advertising dollars. The main advertising support portion of the Internet is the “World Wide Web” that display HyperText Mark-Up Language (HTML) documents distributed using the HyperText Transport Protocol (HTTP). Two of the most common types of advertisements on the World Wide Web are banner advertisements and text link advertisements. Banner advertisements are generally images that are displayed to the viewer of a World Wide Web page. Text link advertisements are generally short segments of text that are linked to the advertiser's Web site.
With any advertising-supported business model, there needs to be reliable metrics for assigning monetary value to the advertising. Radio and television advertising use ratings services that assess how many people are listening to a particular radio program or watching a particular television program in order assign a monetary value to advertising on the respective program. Radio and television programs with larger listening or viewing audiences are assigned larger monetary values for advertising.
With Internet banner type advertisements, a similar metric may be used. For example, the metric may be the number of times that the particular Internet banner advertisement is displayed to people browsing the Web site. However, due to the ability to easily detect how a web viewer interacts with an Internet advertisement, the Internet advertising world has increasingly moved to a pay for performance model wherein advertisers wish to only pay for advertisements that generate a tangible benefit. For example, many Internet advertisers wish to buy advertisements on a “pay per click” (PPC) basis. With such an arrangement, the advertiser only pays for advertising when a web viewer “clicks” on the advertisement. These types of transactions are known as ‘click through’ transactions since the web viewer ‘clicks through’ the advertisement link to see the advertiser's Web site. A click-through clearly has value to the advertiser since an interested web viewer has indicated a desire to see the advertiser's Web site and is subsequently presented with the advertiser's Web site.
In order to run advertising-supported Web sites that run on a pay per click model, the web site advertisements must attract web viewer clicks. Thus, web publishers and web advertisers have developed simplistic systems of attempting to match appropriate web site advertisements to the Web viewers. For example, some advertising supported web sites use simple matching algorithms that attempt to select the most appropriate advertisements for a particular web site. Although the simple matching systems have helped, it would be very desirable to create even more customized advertisements in order to attract web viewers to the advertisements.